As a comparison for these defensive stats, using Soldier's Gloves, boots, shoulders, and chest total +144 tough/vit.

My current build is using rampager's with altruism runes for might stacking and bomb/nade/EG, zerker weapons, and all-stat trinkets.I only run 5 points in Firearms, and I end up with 39% crit rate (without fury or consumables) and 49% crit damage. Also have an antique rabid fractal backpiece that I don't have the relics yet to switch out for zerkers.

Losing the 175 precision is about 8.5% crit rate, so I could drop to ~ 30% crit rate but have 68% crit damage. If I assume 1/3 uptime on fury due to boon duration/altruism CD, thats roughly +7% crit from that.

Did some quick napkin math, and with my gear, my damage multipler from crit doesn't really change with 1/3 fury uptime, but if I assume 100% uptime, theres about a 1% difference, which is pretty small and within my rounding error. Hell, it might even be a DPS loss with losing bleed stacks from Sharpshooter.

So, as for my personal gear set and config, it seems swapping to celestial armor from rampagers would lose me about 2 1/2 might stacks of damage, but gain the durability of 4/6 soldiers and healing power. The healing power adds an additional 70+70 on healing turret, and about 17.5 HP per second from regen. This may not be ideal for PvE content, but for WvW it seems like a good idea.

EDIT: I also looked at celestial weapons, and I don't need to do any calculations to know to avoid them. Unlike the armors, theres no additional crit damage for 1h weapons, and I could not afford to lose any more precision.

EDIT2: Whoops, I looked at my stats when I was dead and they were vastly different, recalculating napkin math, when yer dead, your trait bonuses aren't counted in. Turns out results are still relatively the same because I only have 5 in firearms and 10 in tools.

If you want something more defensive than full Rampager, then go Carrion armor, w/ Rampager trinkets.
You retain 98% of the total DPS potential (but slide more towards conditions than direct damage), and get a 12% bump in vitality.

Going Celestial armor w/ Rampager trinkets instead, you get 96% of the DPS and a 14.5% bump in passive defense (health * armor, aka "how much of a hit can you take?"). I don't have a good way to take healing power or magic find into account.

If you want something more defensive than full Rampager, then go Carrion armor, w/ Rampager trinkets.You retain 98% of the total DPS potential (but slide more towards conditions than direct damage), and get a 12% bump in vitality.

Going Celestial armor w/ Rampager trinkets instead, you get 96% of the DPS and a 14.5% bump in passive defense (health * armor, aka "how much of a hit can you take?"). I don't have a good way to take healing power or magic find into account.

Hmmm, while I do have a rampagers/zerk grenade setup for dungeoneering, I am definitely going to run Celestial for my every day overworld wandering and general play. It's way, way, way better than other MF armor, and facilitates broad skill changes on the fly. Sometimes it's fun to flip between rifle, bombs, pistols, flamethrower, etc etc etc on the go (mostly for fun factor). This is the headache free solution to being competent enough at everything to enjoy it all in one session.

With a 20/20/0/20/10 or 20/20/0/10/20 build and Celestial, I can run everything but grenades without changing gear or retraiting with solid numbers, and to be honest, I'm really, really sick of grenades anyway. Those can stay in the dungeon.

So, I see Celestial as a convenience set. If I am playing around with trash in Orr or doing group events or grabbing daily, doing completion, etc, nothing could be better.

In dungeons, I think it's best to specialize. If you're going for a Condition Damage build, you go full Rabid or Rampager. You don't go half Carrion half Berserker, you know?

But I am curious how the numbers would even out, comparing Celestial to Berserker and Rampager. You lose out on a lot of Precision but I would think the addition of Critical Damage in gear would balance out the lower Power and Condition Damage. I don't know. Would love to see some Fort Marriner dummy testing on this (I do not think Celestial trinket in the Mists is comparable to the PvE stat allocation).

I also think the added Magic Find would be nice for open world content, and having a bit extra Healing Power is always good for WvW.

I don't think this is the bludgeon to the head to the "DPS or GTFO" mantra that many players espouse, but I would like to see some builds that effectively wield all of those stats to their fullest potential. The FT/EG combo or Elixir-Infused Bombs would be ideal places to start.

In dungeons, I think it's best to specialize. If you're going for a Condition Damage build, you go full Rabid or Rampager. You don't go half Carrion half Berserker, you know?

But I am curious how the numbers would even out, comparing Celestial to Berserker and Rampager. You lose out on a lot of Precision but I would think the addition of Critical Damage in gear would balance out the lower Power and Condition Damage. I don't know. Would love to see some Fort Marriner dummy testing on this (I do not think Celestial trinket in the Mists is comparable to the PvE stat allocation).

I posted a comparison above: Just looking at the armors, rampagers is 315 precision, which is 175 more than celestial. Thats about 8.33% crit chance, but you gain 19% crit damage in compensation. Like I said above, for me and my crit numbers, its about equal.

You do lose power and condition dmg as well, but its not too bad. Honestly my playstyle with grenades most of the time involves me to swapping to bombs most of the time. I put myself in danger a lot, but generally I can play safe with all the blinds in my kit.

In dungeons, I think it's best to specialize. If you're going for a Condition Damage build, you go full Rabid or Rampager. You don't go half Carrion half Berserker, you know?

Who mentioned a Carrion/Beserker split? I was mentioning a Carrion/Rampager split, as a step away from full Rampager.Carrion vs Rabid is about the same as both are major Condition Damage, but Carrion's Power is on par with Rabid's Precision, while Rabid's Toughness may be preferred over Carrion's Vitality. I prefer Vit in dungeons, since you're less of an aggro magnet, and have better depth against conditions.

Btw, I'm assuming a grenade dominant build, which can utilize all the stats.

But I am curious how the numbers would even out, comparing Celestial to Berserker and Rampager. You lose out on a lot of Precision but I would think the addition of Critical Damage in gear would balance out the lower Power and Condition Damage. I don't know. Would love to see some Fort Marriner dummy testing on this (I do not think Celestial trinket in the Mists is comparable to the PvE stat allocation).

I could certainly see an arguement for Swapping between Rampager and Celestial armor, while keeping the trinkets Rampager. Go Rampager for the DPS, go Celestial for more defense and Magic Find equal to Traveler's or Explorer's.

Who mentioned a Carrion/Beserker split? I was mentioning a Carrion/Rampager split, as a step away from full Rampager.

Oh, nobody. I was using it as an example. Sorry that it hit a bit close to your own concept. That was entirely coincidental.

I was establishing that if someone builds around Condition Damage, you gear around Condition Damage. As in ... Carrion, Rabid, or Rampager, yes? Because whoever does the most damage has their Bleeds stick around once you hit the 25 cap. The problem with Celestial in my mind, at least in PvE, is that you're not really going to be doing a lot of damage with your bleeds because they'll be consistently overwritten by others in world events, guild missions, etc. etc.

Yup, and you get considerable survivability and MF bonuses alongside (38% not counting amulet infusion). To me its completely worth it, and if I absolutely have to run dungeons fast, I got my full zerker warrior whom I'm getting the gold infusion for anyways.

At one point I got sucked into pondering what the effect of different options were, and so I wrote a Python script to do all the math for me in evaluating the results. I dislike spreadsheets, since it's so hard to do complex conditionals and even harder to go back and check your work.

I've often wondered if a full celestial would be good for an Ele, or an Engi for the same reasons. What would be the highest possible stat bonus for each stat, assuming ascended jewelry and exotic armor/weapon/runes? I suck at math, but assuming celestial is around 5/8 the minor stats, I get 515. I may be way off, but it would be interesting to see a side by side comparison with berserker's.

I've often wondered if a full celestial would be good for an Ele, or an Engi for the same reasons. What would be the highest possible stat bonus for each stat, assuming ascended jewelry and exotic armor/weapon/runes? I suck at math, but assuming celestial is around 5/8 the minor stats, I get 515. I may be way off, but it would be interesting to see a side by side comparison with berserker's.

From my understanding, Celestial elementalists are pretty damn good in WvW and PvP because they can utilize every stat well. For PvE, I'm not exactly sure, and I have no clue since my ele is still only 26.

At one point I got sucked into pondering what the effect of different options were, and so I wrote a Python script to do all the math for me in evaluating the results. I dislike spreadsheets, since it's so hard to do complex conditionals and even harder to go back and check your work.

Ah Python scripts. I used to do a little bit of number crunching myself in other games using MATLAB, but theres so many variables in GW2 that I personally didn't find it worth it. Theres so many buffs to take into consideration that affect optimization (warrior banners, Empowered Allies (and the Ranger's version for Precision)), condition overrides, and condition immune fights. I'll just trust your numbers.

I'm actually in the opposite boat; I bought all-stat trinkets back when KR proc'd super elixir and after the super elixir buff. Healing power was pretty damn effective when that patch was released, but following the KR nerf it got a helluva lot weaker. So I'm stuck with those trinkets and rampagers armor instead.

If you compare on gw2buildcraft, I saw the difference damage-wise between rampager and celestial trinkets (assuming rampager+giver gear and some might stacks) was around 200 condition damage, the added crit damage keeps your effective power about the same. In exchange you get 160 in each defense attribute and 20% MF. And now this armor has even higher crit ratio compared to jewels. (I do worry about precision dropping too low from going full celestial though, assuming I don't have perma fury; maybe there is a good midpoint somewhere.)

It actually compares pretty favorably I think -- depending on what you're doing. For example, I tend to run Phineas Poe's FT/EG build (0/25/0/20/25). I like this far better over grenades in general -- my preference, not going into arguments over grenades vs. FT.

FT is primarily a power/crit kind of build. That in mind, the going in assumptions into this analysis are we're going to take berserker weapons, and berserker accessories. So this is just taking a look at the armor itself.

Initially, the celestial seems to lack the power you'd get in berserker kit. However remember with FT/EG, we're also a bit more focused on support so we're often taking Runes of Altruism. Definitely a group support choice in that for area might and fury on a 15-20 second period. To make up for celestial's lack of outright power, a different rune choice is required. For analysis I went with scholar. Power and crit damage are central to FT's damaging schema so it seemed to make sense.

(Hopefully that's legible... I may have to edit it to tweak it around as there's no live preview. EDIT: Freakin' hell, even put it into Notepad++ to line everything up and it's still boned. That's the best I can do with the time I've got at the moment, sorry about formatting.).

Anyhow, the end result is nearly equivalent which I found pretty interesting. Slight loss (-10) in Attack/Power and Crit Rate (-4%) with a larger pickup in crit damage and condition damage. And the expected increase in death mitigation.

Berserker/Altruism I think still wins, but the margin is really slight. I'd call damage more or less a wash, with slight edge to Berserker/Altruism as it's unclear to me how much the 11% increase in crit damage may offset that. FT/EG does make SOME (not a lot) use of condition damage which also may tend to mitigate. And very certainly Berserker/Altruism has some greater group synergy in the might/fury benefits.

But... it's a very small difference. Small enough to be interesting in any event. Anyhow, maybe that helps shed a little light on a possible use for it.

It actually compares pretty favorably I think -- depending on what you're doing. For example, I tend to run Phineas Poe's FT/EG build (0/25/0/20/25). I like this far better over grenades in general -- my preference, not going into arguments over grenades vs. FT.

FT is primarily a power/crit kind of build. That in mind, the going in assumptions into this analysis are we're going to take berserker weapons, and berserker accessories. So this is just taking a look at the armor itself.

Initially, the celestial seems to lack the power you'd get in berserker kit. However remember with FT/EG, we're also a bit more focused on support so we're often taking Runes of Altruism. Definitely a group support choice in that for area might and fury on a 15-20 second period. To make up for celestial's lack of outright power, a different rune choice is required. For analysis I went with scholar. Power and crit damage are central to FT's damaging schema so it seemed to make sense.

(Hopefully that's legible... I may have to edit it to tweak it around as there's no live preview. EDIT: Freakin' hell, even put it into Notepad++ to line everything up and it's still boned. That's the best I can do with the time I've got at the moment, sorry about formatting.).

Anyhow, the end result is nearly equivalent which I found pretty interesting. Slight loss (-10) in Attack/Power and Crit Rate (-4%) with a larger pickup in crit damage and condition damage. And the expected increase in death mitigation.

Berserker/Altruism I think still wins, but the margin is really slight. I'd call damage more or less a wash, with slight edge to Berserker/Altruism as it's unclear to me how much the 11% increase in crit damage may offset that. FT/EG does make SOME (not a lot) use of condition damage which also may tend to mitigate. And very certainly Berserker/Altruism has some greater group synergy in the might/fury benefits.

But... it's a very small difference. Small enough to be interesting in any event. Anyhow, maybe that helps shed a little light on a possible use for it.

Just what I was looking for. Excellent work on this.

The thing that surprised me most, though, is that Celestial had less Healing Power than running Altruism runes. I wonder: How bad would our damage be if we ran Celestial with Altruism and not Scholar?

Either way, it looks like I'll be putting Scholar runes on my Celestial set once it's complete.

The thing that surprised me most, though, is that Celestial had less Healing Power than running Altruism runes. I wonder: How bad would our damage be if we ran Celestial with Altruism and not Scholar?

Either way, it looks like I'll be putting Scholar runes on my Celestial set once it's complete.

I don't know if scholar is all that useful with celestial; it seems like only a marginal DPS increase

Total Stats: 165 power, 8% crit damage, and 10% damage while over 90%

Lets look at altruism runes. I'm going to assume that its my build (30/5/0/25/10), so I have 40% boon duration. Also I'm using healing turret to blast finisher (either fire or water) whenever I can, meaning 20 second turret CD. I end up with 33% uptime on fury, and 66% uptime on 3 might stacks. If your group doesn't have permanent fury, that fury (for personal use) translates into 7% crit about, which we can just round to about 140 precision worth of crit. Same for might stacks, 66% uptime on 3 stacks= roughly the damage of about 2 stacks or 70 power/condition.

Crit damage just doesn't scale too well on an engineer. Yes, its still good to have, but celestial armor grenade damage is what, 70% direct and 30% conditions about? Without excessive number crunching, I just don't see too great of a benefit switching to scholar runes, even in celestial.

I will take a guess and assume because Engineers are very heavy on conditions - and crits have no impact there.

My general take on Celestial gear is that it is too split-attention. A smaller bonus to everything is not very useful compared to an intelligent focus to maximize potential in whatever spot a person's playstyle best uses.

Celestial gear is designed for the people who hit every button on the action bar, in random order, ALL THE TIME, and then swap weapons randomly between every weapon allowed for their class, on cooldown, and every time they leave combat switch out the two for two others.

- Unless your strats it to roll your face over your keyboard as fast as possible withouth care for what you do, Celestial gear is weaker. It has no focus. No attention. Its the ADD split personality gearset of GW2.

I will take a guess and assume because Engineers are very heavy on conditions - and crits have no impact there.

My general take on Celestial gear is that it is too split-attention. A smaller bonus to everything is not very useful compared to an intelligent focus to maximize potential in whatever spot a person's playstyle best uses.

Celestial gear is designed for the people who hit every button on the action bar, in random order, ALL THE TIME, and then swap weapons randomly between every weapon allowed for their class, on cooldown, and every time they leave combat switch out the two for two others.

- Unless your strats it to roll your face over your keyboard as fast as possible withouth care for what you do, Celestial gear is weaker. It has no focus. No attention. Its the ADD split personality gearset of GW2.

Engineers use both conditions and direct damage. My build, for example, normally keeps up 15-18 bleed stacks, fire, and poison. Bleed ticks for roughly 110, fire for 650, 175 poison about, come out roughly around 2.5k DPS from conditions.Normal nade tosses are around 2k, shrapnel with 4 sec CD around 3.5k-4k, and grenade barrage, just.. a lot, prolly averaging around 6k-8k from all the nades hitting. Its close to 65-35 for rampager builds, and closer to 80-20 with berserker.

In terms of min/max, Rampagers and berserkers are pretty close in overall damage, but as of the new patch, zerker can technically pull ahead with use of the scope, but scope doesn't apply if you are closer than 600.

Long story short, Rod already did some number crunching above, showing that celestial gear doesn't lose too much damage in exchange for all the extra survivability.

The difference in Precision between Celestial and Berserker isn't all that much. Berserker insignia armor adds 224 Precision as a minor stat. Celestial adds 140 Precision, similar to every other stat. That's a difference of 84 Precision.

The difference in Precision between Celestial and Berserker isn't all that much. Berserker insignia armor adds 224 Precision as a minor stat. Celestial adds 140 Precision, similar to every other stat. That's a difference of 84 Precision.

"Not a big deal" is too anecdotal, when making a comparison.Higher crit = more value on critdamage%;More critdamage% with high crit is more valuable than less crit with higher critdamage%./quote]

Passing 4% crit off as "not a big deal" is silly; and saying "those numbers mean absolutely nothing to me" when making a comparison involving numbers is even more silly.Don't be silly.

Rather than telling me to not "be silly," why don't you explain to me why I should find losing that Precision to be a big deal?

You're offsetting 4% Critical Hit Chance for additional Healing Power, 1400 Health, and 140 Armor, which is enough to elevate your Engineer to the level similar to a heavy armor class---with 3% Magic Find per slot.

If people value their Precision that much, then that's fine. Stick with Berserker. But putting up some kind of appearance like I am an idiot for not seeing the greater importance of 4% Critical Hit Chance doesn't really contribute anything to the conversation, and is really just needlessly abrasive.

I asked my question because I was confused as to why he wrote that the Engineer doesn't scale well with Critical Damage. I see now that he meant that in reference to the stat allocation Engineers often go for versus Warriors, and not the skills the class uses (or its coefficients).

Rather than telling me to not "be silly," why don't you explain to me why I should find losing that Precision to be a big deal?

You're offsetting 4% Critical Hit Chance for additional Healing Power, 1400 Health, and 140 Armor, which is enough to elevate your Engineer to the level similar to a heavy armor class---with 3% Magic Find per slot.

If people value their Precision that much, then that's fine. Stick with Berserker. But putting up some kind of appearance like I am an idiot for not seeing the greater importance of 4% Critical Hit Chance doesn't really contribute anything to the conversation, and is really just needlessly abrasive.

I asked my question because I was confused as to why he wrote that the Engineer doesn't scale well with Critical Damage. I see now that he meant that in reference to the stat allocation Engineers often go for versus Warriors, and not the skills the class uses (or its coefficients).

The damage loss is the important factor. The toughness, healing power, and vitality add up to maybe one extra hit you can take from most dungeon mobs - and the healing power is almost inconsequential. ANet didn't really do all too much to incentivise stats aside from the damage ones.

In the end, shifting out Berserkers for Celestials is a damage loss - and survivability isn't really the name of the game, as the stats scale now. Save your money and stick with your Berserker/Rampager set.

The minimul precision loss is only an important factor, if and only if, in his opinion it has more benefit to his build and and playstyle then the total benefit of all the other stats he gains. Sure it is a very small damage loss, but your assuming damage is the end all be all importance to his playstyle, build intent, and fun level. That may not be the case. If he fills that trade off is not a big deal, then who are you to attack him for it and make statements such as he is being silly .

Although I completely agree that Anet didn't really do all too much to incentivise stats aside from the damage ones, there is not reason to verbally snub folks for finding value in the tradeoff.

And where did I say that it was? My build has zero points in Inventions, and 20 points in Alchemy purely for Deadly Mixture.

Celestial is a balance between offense and defense. Wearing Celestial isn't a statement saying that survivability is any more important than damage---it just values both. And in that regard, the FT/EG build is one of the most popular setups for the class, which while does plenty of damage on its own, factors in group support as well.

It's why I often prefer Altruism runes on my Engineer over Ruby Orbs/Scholar, and it's why I went with Syzygy as my first ascended amulet. I have a Distinguished Circle of Logic as well, but I'll be honest: I can't really tell a difference in my DPS between both. On paper you could probably find one, but in practice it's negligible.

So when you want to talk of stats scaling, I just scratch my head, because 140 Toughness is roughly a 10% reduction in damage taken. If you value your damage more, that's fine, but I have a Warrior for top-notch DPS, and I certainly don't build my Engineer or Guardian the same way. There's nothing inherent about this game that suggests every class should be built for full DPS, either.

Especially with the soon-to-be added restriction of only being able to run the same path twice in one day for gold reward, speed farming is going to become totally unnecessary. I realize that finishing Arah path 3 in 30 minutes versus 25 is a big issue to some people, but they're not for me, and it certainly didn't inhibit me completing Dungeon Master wearing a Celestial amulet over a Berserker one. The other day I ran path 4 in a little over 90 minutes with 2 slots occupying Celestial gear, so excuse me if I don't see the big deal about a small loss in Precision.

I care more about the group not wiping, and while many players are skilled enough to wear full Berserker and survive all right, I am not going to apply that expectation to every player I meet. The idea that Berserker beats everything is something that bothers the hell out of me, primarily because it makes picking up players outside of my guild a dreadful experience. They eat up the "DPS or GTFO" mantra many guides on Guru espouse, walk into a dungeon they're unfamiliar with, and proceed to get carried by me the rest of the path. Not because they're bad players, but simply because they've steepened the learning curve for the advantage of ... what, exactly?

I do value the fact that Celestial means I can take one extra hit, because that one extra hit may make the difference between me getting my Toss Elixir R off or not and preventing a walk of shame.

Well, glad to see that there was some general value in fiddling with that. It should be said, it's hardly the last word on the armor set by far as well. There might be a niche rune that makes it shine even more. Choosing scholar to go with the set was an out and out attempt to make up for the dent in damage output to bring it up to par with a berserker with almost any rune set.

So... it's sort of a niche thing.

As far as the DPS loss, the discussion of a percent here and a percent there... seriously, it's kind of meaningless since we have no real DPS meter. You can spend all day banging on golems but it's still pretty anecdotal and that's why people always couch those observations with "seems like I was hitting harder" etc when there is a random number component. Humans generally are terrible with measuring random things. You can get a general feel, but personally I do not think anyone is going to be able to notice a shift in a few percentage points here and there. It's very hard to pin this down on small increments. It takes a BIG increment (like moving to grenades) to see something definite.

The upshot is if you were using a FT/EG build with berserker/altruism -- you could probably switch to celestial/scholar and your personal damage would be approximately the same. There are some tradeoffs (group support, group buff) but maybe situationally that's a decent choice.

As far as "DPS wins over all" well.. changes to dungeons are coming. Not only the reward structure is getting shaken up, but I believe there was a statement along the lines that they didn't want to make dungeon alterations like they did before, but wanted to introduce a story element. To me, that suggests they've been sitting on a number of tweaks and they very well could make glass cannons far more of a liability than they are now with cofpie. A few tweaks to mitigation, healing, and endurance and people will NEED to be able to eat a few more hits than they do currently.

Could be very interesting in the future. Or they could muff it and glass cannon dps could remain the go-to for a lot of runs. Who knows :-).

Also, it occurred to me that it's a hideously EXPENSIVE set of armor to make... but that's neither here nor there really.

Great work on the mathmatical aspects: kudos to Rod and Remillard. I whipped up a set of zerk emblazoned armor today, but after reading this post I just sent it to the AH as I was already sporting rampagers for my FT/EG build.